[Q&A Coffee Break] 07/25/23, 8am PST: Deliverability & Bots, Featuring Marketo Engage Champions!

[aWyskiel]

@Ajay_Sarpal5 @Beth_Massura 

Based on the analysis made on our Newsletter programs, BOT activity is inflating our click rate metrics. We noticed a strong engagement in all email metrics where almost in all cases 75% of clicks to preheader (first link in email) with marginal engagement with all other content. Our preheader looks like unlined standard text, so in our opinion the possibility that a real person clicks on it is very low.

Solutions that we already tried to improve our bot management:

1. Marketo bot activity feature - we enabled the option to Log Bot Activity. This option is not working for us as only a small percentage of bots are flagged correctly. 
2. We implemented a hidden link at the top of email to capture bots that click at the first link in the email. This internal solution together with updating the list of IPs on Marketo side (16 additional IPs addresses blocklisted) seems to have worked for us. Unfortunately after reverting the changes by removing the 16 identified IPs from the blocklist (ref link), we observed the bot clicks increase again.

Could you please advise how we can improve our bot management and exclude them from the click metrics? 

[Beth_Massura]

Hi @aWyskiel ,

The out-of-the-box Marketo bot filter is mostly based on a specific list of known bot IPs. However, a lot of companies have legitimate email scanners that check the links for safety before delivering to the intended recipient and these would not be logged by that option. Do you have "log bot activity" selected for both the "Match with IAB List" and "Match with Proximity Pattern"?

[aWyskiel]

Hi @Beth_Massura we are filtering Bot activities for both - IAB list and Proximity Pattern

[andyh25]

@Beth_Massura @Ajay_Sarpal2 

Would be interested to learn if anyone has used alternatives to Google ReCAPTCHA V3 for their captcha provider. We have a privacy focused team that is not keen on using an advertiser to manage captcha and looking at alternatives like friendly captcha

[AjayS]

Hi, @andyh25 

If you are not using ReCAPTCHA v3, you may be exposing your Marketo forms to bots and spam, which can affect your email deliverability, performance, and reputation. Therefore, you should use some alternative methods to protect your forms from bots and spam.

One possible alternative is to use Honeypot and Akismet Anti-Spam if you are using WordPress CMS and your Marketo forms are hosted on WordPress. Honeypot is a simple and lightweight anti-spam technique that involves adding a hidden field to your form that is visible only to bots but not to humans. If the hidden field is filled out, it means that the submission is from a bot and can be rejected or ignored. You can implement this technique using CSS or JavaScript on your form. Akismet Anti-Spam is a WordPress plugin that checks your form submissions against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You can install and activate the Akismet Anti-Spam plugin from the WordPress plugin directory.

[AjayS]

Welcome to the Q&A Coffee Break on Deliverability & Bots! We are excited to have you with us and we hope you will enjoy this session.

[Beth_Massura]

Hi everyone! Glad to join you today to answer your questions on deliverability and bots!

[stefanipavlova]

@Beth_Massura @Ajay_Sarpal2 

What would be the first step to start increasing our deliverability rate?

[Beth_Massura]

Hi @stefanipavlova , great question! I'd say the best first step is to be as intentional and targeted with your email content and audiences as possible, rather than sending general content to broader audiences. Ultimately, this will have the greatest impact on recipients actually engaging with your content. But also, conducting an audit of your deliverability to date - looking at delivery rates, hard & soft bounces, spam complaints, etc., will provide you with hard data on what technical challenges you may be having.

[stefanipavlova]

Thank you @Beth_Massura  🙂